The correct code is Professor Schwartz's code, evaluate that. I can see you tried to copy it, but there are a few mistakes. As a newbie to Perl, it is important to know what you did incorrectly. I hope this helps you with future Perl. As that is the most important thing, that you get a good understanding of perl.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

$DATA='data.txt';

open (DATA,"<$DATA")
     || die "Can't open $DATA $!";

#
# Why do this???
#

#    @line = <DATA>;

#foreach (@line) {

#
# for future reference, chop is unsafe ( it cuts off the last 
# character, no matter what it is ) use chomp instead, it 
# takes off all of the trailing whitespace.
#
#    chop;

#
#the brackets around split are unnecessary
#
#    ($key, $one, $two, $three, $four, $five, $six) = (split(/,/));

#
# This is completely unnecessary ( since they are already null if they
+ do not exist )
# the only things you might get are warnings of uninitialized variable
+s.
#

#    $key  = "" if !defined($key);              #this should make it n
+ull if nothing's there
#    $one = "" if !defined($one);
#    $two = "" if !defined($two);
#    $three  = "" if !defined($three);
#    $four  = "" if !defined($four);
#    $five  = "" if !defined($five);
#    $six  = "" if !defined($six);
#}


    #
    # Notice Code, ALA Schwartz
    #
    #while (<DATA>) {
    #  chomp;
    #  my @line = split /,\s*/;
    #  my $key = shift @line;
    #  push @{$data{$key}}, \@line;
    #}
    #

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;

#
# Once again brackets around split are totally unnecessary
#

#
# if you do not put my in front of @line, when you
# push the reference (\@line), onto the array in the hash,
# you will get a reference to the same array over and over
#
# also would be good to put my in front of $key, although
# not necessary 
#

    @line = split(/,\s*/);             # was getting errors on split /
+,\s*/;
    $key = shift @line;
    push @{$data{$key}}, \@line;
}

print $data{"Andrea"}[0][1], " should be good\n";             # offset
+s off by one
print $data{"Dave"}[0][1], " should be better\n";
print $data{"Joe"}[0][1], " should be 0\n";

#
# Good programming Style
#
    close(DATA);
[download]

I hope this helps
- Have Fun, XDB19

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